This invention relates to the field of inventory management and more specifically, to a specific technique of integrating discovered inventory data from third-party discovery applications to an asset management system.
Large organizations often have trouble keeping track of their assets. The assets are purchased and deployed throughout the organization and then become increasingly difficult to account for. Accounting of these assets is necessary to maintain compliance with regard to leases, material financial impact of the assets, and software license compliance among other things. Increasingly, organizations are deploying asset tracking (i.e., physical or automatic discovery) mechanisms that can retrieve the actual asset information as it is utilized in the organization.
The asset tracking data is typically stored at the organization's site. Organizations want to take the information that comes from the physical discovery and load or integrate the discovery data into the asset management system.
One approach uses a generic XML structure to integrate discovery applications' inventory data using a request-response model. This model of integration with discovery applications' inventory data has a user or third-party vendor build out a process to consume the request and produce a response. To use the request-response model, the discovery application vendor would need to understand the request, parse through the terms in the request, query their system, and produce the results in the response.
Typically, very few discovery applications provide functionality to work with the request-response model and asset management system. This may be for various reasons, such as the discovery application vendors may not want to invest the time or resources to build out their half of this model. So, when a customer purchases the asset management system and wishes to use a discovery application without a prebuilt connector for the request-response model, the customer generally has to hire a systems integrator to build a custom integration.
Therefore, there is a need for a solution that will lower the total cost of ownership by removing the need for the third-party discovery vendor (or systems integrator) to provide an XML connector to process the existing request in the current request-response model. Error handling provides better data management as data entering the system from third parties can be corrected locally without having to be resubmitted. The new functionality leverages existing functionality to ensure a complete end-to-end process from the discovery data entering the asset management system through to reconciliation of that data against the asset repository.
Therefore, there is a need for a technique of using a Web service or a manual load to facilitate the integration of discovery data into the asset management system.